Kill the Dead(48)

They ate by the fire, and then she brought out a skin of beer, and they drank together. She began to comb her fingers through her hair until it became an electric crackling blizzard of golden smoke. She sang to the flames drowsily, her voice light and throbbing. She was making an intuitive magic, all of it for him. As Silky had done in the apple tree, sun in her hair, murmuring to birds or leaves... and when he spoke to her now, she gazed at him, unsurprised as Silky had been.

“Can I pay you for the meal?”

“I don’t think so,” she said.

They spoke about the season for a while, and about the showman’s trade her husband intermittently practiced. She asked Dro nothing, not even his name. He did not ask hers either. He could not have called her by it. Just as he could never have brought himself to call her “Silky.” The whole episode was dreamlike, transient.

The dog slept on its side, turned also to gold by the firelight, then to ruby as the flames sank low.

When they each leaned to cast a branch on the fire, their bodies finally touched. The act of sex had become so inevitable and so desired between them that he seemed to have had her before, many times. Everything was familiar, without hesitation, awkwardness or apology. She was lovely, even what the years had softly faded, or etched with their gold, was lovely, in her.

Afterwards, they lay wrapped together by the fire. The wood breathed. Their own breathing lulled both of them asleep, and later woke them again.

About an hour before sunrise, the whining of the dog roused Parl Dro.

It was cold, the clear wet chill that dripped through the trees before a summer dawn. The fire was out. The woman, showered over by her summer hair, lay sleeping on her side. Her face was cupped into one hand. One bare full breast gleamed out against her own tawny colour, startlingly snow-white. The dog stood, hackles raised. A horse cropped the turf nearby. Beside the wagon was a man.

He looked almost every inch the uncouth robber the woman had feared the night before. From that alone, Dro recognised him as her husband. Squat, dirty and dishevelled, he poised in a bizarre kind of half crouch, hair and clothes flopping, and a loose gut flopping before all that. Only the man’s hands were curious, thin and articulate, though crammed now into raw red fists.

“Well,” he said, slurred and drunken and all too lucid, “well, well, well.”

The situation was laughable, the pith of many an inn song and joke. Dro got to his feet slowly, pulling his clothes together as he did so, and the man winked malevolently, leering.

“Well, well, well.”

Dro said nothing, and then the man thought of some more words.

“Aren’t you going to say: It’s all a bad mistake? Aren’t you going to say: Just because you found me lying between your wife’s legs, I don’t actually have to have been doing anything with her? Well?”

“I’ll say all that, if you like,” Dro said.

“Like? Like?” The man straightened. He stepped over a leather sack on the grass—robber’s booty? As he passed the dog, not looking at it, it cowered. He came walking through the ashes of the fire. “You forced her,” said the man. “Right? She was unwilling and you raped her.”

“Yes. I raped her.”

“She looks raped. I must say. Definitely raped.”

Dro was aware the woman had woken and sat up, but he did not turn to her. The man was now close enough that the stench of ill-digested alcohol on his breath struck Dro’s nostrils. Dro moved an inch or so, coming between husband and wife in the only manner left.

“I think,” said the man, smiling down at his wife, “she was slightly willing.”

Dro moved, his fist already rising, left arm already extending to block any move the other man might make. But the woman was on her feet, catching back Dro’s arm.

“No,” she panted. “No. It’s all right.”

“Of course it is,” said the man. “Why should I care? I’ve been with a whore all night.” He beamed at Dro. “Both been with whores. Yours any good? Mine was.”

The woman began to push Dro fiercely.

“Go away. Please. Go away now.”

She was breathless. Dro said, “You’d better come with me.”

“Who’ll cook my breakfast?” asked the man aggrieved. “Come on, I don’t care.” He sat down by the dead fire and took off his boots carefully. “Let’s have some service,” he said.

The woman, holding her dress together over her white breasts with her brown hands, took up the beerskin and handed it to her husband.